Festival Filem Malaysia boots non-Malay films out of Best Director and Best Screenplay, creates separate categories

NATIONAL film awards ceremony Festival Filem Malaysia ke-28 (FFM28) received backlash from the industry today after unveiling its nominees.

Continuing once again to segregate films based on how much Bahasa Melayu is spoken in them, the ceremony was lambasted by writers association PENULIS for dividing viewers by language and for assigning non-Malay films less worth despite claiming to represent the Malaysian film industry as a whole.

The awards ceremony has gone several steps further and this year will split directors and scripts based on whether Malay is the film’s dominant language — now there’s also a Pengarah Terbaik (Filem Bukan Dalam Bahasa Melayu) and Lakon Layar Terbaik (Filem Bukan Dalam Bahasa Melayu).

This effectively rules out any chances of a win for Shanjhey Kumar Perumal, Chiu Keng Guan or Jess Teong for their critically-acclaimed releases this year. Shanjhey and Jess were instead nominated under the Pengarah Baharu Terbaik category.

The most surprising category this year was for best screenplay, which has unexpected titles like Love Supermoon, Suamiku, Encik Perfect 10! and Mat Moto – Kami Mat Moto Bukan Mat Rempit making the cut due to a bulk of the year’s most significant releases making the new category. This year’s most popular titles —Jagat, OlaBolaand The Kid From The Big Apple — were also disqualified from the best film category because they did not contain enough Malay language.

There were 27 categories contested these years, but only 28 films received nominations. OlaBola was the biggest nominee with nods in 14 categories, while Polis Evo scored 10 mentions. In third place is a tie between Jagat and Munafik.

This year’s nominees were coincidentally put forward by PFM (Persatuan Penerbit Filem Malaysia), also led by SKOP Production honcho Yusof Haslam. It is understood that FINAS Director-General Kamil Othman was not involved in the nominations.

What did you expect when a bunch of Rempits are given the task to oversee the film industry in our country? I’m surprised they didn’t create a Filem Retro Terbaik, Filem TerMelayu Terbaeeek and Filem Kipidab Dongibab categories.